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Forecasts

Requirements

Forecasts is a small Rails app that I wrote for a take home interview. The requirements were:

  1. The project must be completed in Ruby on Rails.
  2. It accepts an address as input from the user.
  3. Given the address, it displays the weather forecast data to the user. At minimum, this includes the current temperature, but could also include things like the daily high/low or extended forecast.
  4. It should cache the forecast details for 30 minutes for all subsequent requests by zip code. In addition, it should display an indicator if the result is pulled from the cache.

Solution

My solution uses two pages: an index page and a show page for zip codes.

The index page has a form that accepts a free form address. The form is then POSTed to forecasts#create for geocoding. If we can successfully turn the address into a zip code, the user is redirected to /<zip code>.

The show page uses the zip code from the path to get a lat and lon that can be passed to the weather API. The information is then displayed to the user.

Error states like form validation and connection issues with the third party APIs are accounted for in the UI.

Live Demo

A demo can be seen at https://forecasts.onrender.com/. Note that this is using render's hobby plan, so you may see a ~30 second "wake up" time.

Code Architecture

ForecastsController is where the majority of the logic lives. A weather client and helper module for geocoding live in /lib.

Address and ZipCode models exist as a place to centralize validation concerns, but are not persisted.

The business logic is tested primarily through request specs. VCR is used for API stubbing. ActiveSupport::Testing:TimeHelpers are used for testing the caching indicator product requirement.

ActiveSupport::Cache::Store is used for caching. In a real production app, we would use ActiveSupport::Cache::RedisCacheStore as the backing store.

I didn't use any service objects. If the controllers were more complex, I would have split the logic out to make it easier to unit test the business rules.

Limitations and Future Enhancements

There are a number of limitations and known issues:

  • The chosen geocoding API doesn't work very well. For example, 34343 is mapped to Denver, but it's actually in Sarasota, FL. In a real project, I would use Google's geocoding API, but I didn't want to use any service that required a credit card or have more of a surface area than geocoding to avoid any possibility of surprise bills.

  • The extended forecast is hardcoded placeholder values. This is possible to build with api.weather.gov, but I didn't have time to build this out.

  • The forecast description from api.weather.gov can be as long as 8 words. I just use the first two words. An enhancement could be made to summarize the phrase instead.

  • I was unable to get resources: forecasts, path: '/' working correctly with the path helpers, so I explicitly wrote out the routes instead.